As Britons, you will all know of Henry VIII. The king who threw a fit over not getting his way when it came to religion and his relationship with the established church.
A tantrum that started with foreign policy and ended with religious persecution and the creation of a state-run church.
Now, you would imagine that this sort of behaviour is a thing of the past. A past where royal families ruled with untrammelled power, uncaring and facing no consequences for their actions.
But what if I told you that, in the world’s oldest Christian country, a similar situation has developed? In Armenia, the first nation to adopt Christianity as its state religion, its Prime Minister has decided that he cannot tolerate the continued existence of a church that will refuse to kowtow before him.
This Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, recently increased his personal office budget. Opposition voices originally suggested that the increase was almost quadrupling the cash available to Pashinyan.
Fortunately for ordinary Armenians, it was quickly clarified by the government that it was only an increase of around $20m, roughly 50 per cent more than the previous year.
This unprecedented increase means that he will have a larger combined annual budget ($65 million) than the entirety of four of Europe’s remaining royal families.
If you add the annual budgets of the Danish (roughly $19m), Belgian (around $16.5), Swedish (almost $10m) and Spanish (about $9m) royal families, you will still be more than $10m short of what Pashinyan has decided is a reasonable budget for his personal office.
Meanwhile, Pashinyan’s uncompromising and ever-increasing control over both Armenia’s judicial system, media landscape and religion is the stuff that many of these constitutional monarchs might have a fever dream about.
The origin of Pashinyan’s attack on the Armenian Apostolic Church is in his failure to protect Armenian Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Tens of thousands were cleansed from the region following the Azeri victory. The Church has a spiritual responsibility to those Armenians that it refused to abrogate.
Britain's war on the church is inspiring an attack on the world's oldest Christian nation - Robert Amsterdam
|Getty Images
Make no mistake about how this is playing out: Pashinyan has announced that he will subsume Armenia’s largest church into state control. That he will not allow the Church to “oppose the state interest”. In other words, his interest.
This is straight out of the playbook of Henry VIII. The Church would not blindly follow his will and refused to end its criticism of his government, so he would use the coercive power of the state to crush the slightest possibility of dissent.
Luckily, the UK learnt over time that gross invasions of the religious freedom of churches do little for social harmony. Even when Justin Welby, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, resigned in disgrace, the government did not interfere in the efforts to appoint a successor. It rightly deferred to the internal regulations of the church and let the process take its course.
In Armenia, however, Pashinyan seeks to control the church and subvert its ancient canon law. Many of Church’s senior clergy have been arrested.
Under these conditions, they decided to hold a special Synod in Austria, fearing state repercussions if it had been held in Armenia, to discuss the crackdown on the church. In response, Pashinyan ordered the indictment of the Catholicos (leader of the church), Karekin II, to prevent him from travelling abroad.
The Church’s most prominent backer, Samvel Karapetyan, was unjustly arrested and jailed in response to his support.
All the while, Pashinyan has made ludicrous, inflammatory and outright vulgar statements, including allegations of illegitimate children and saying he wants to expose himself on national television.
This is rather similar to how Henry VIII treated Catholics who refused to bow to his new state-run Church of England. Arrest and worse faced those who did not submit to the King’s diktats.
How will this end in Armenia? Either Pashinyan will lose the coming election in June or he will win and consolidate his grip on Armenia. A grip that will further deprive Armenians of their rights.
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